The Weed Monster, Part I

An excerpt from a silly story I wrote for class, inspired, if you will, by my goddamn overgrown yard. Anyway, empty auditorium and all, I figured why not. I may or may not post more.

I’m a person who likes things to be a certain way. I can’t say I was born this way, although I guess it’s possible that I have a certain genetic predisposition. My mother used to scrub every surface in our house until it gleamed. She would cry if my brothers and I came into the house tracking mud onto her freshly scrubbed and dried linoleum floors. She refused to have carpeting because of the dirt that can linger in them even if you vacuum and shampoo. She made my father install linoleum everywhere we didn’t already have hardwood floors. Because of the linoleum in the bedrooms, our house was a bit stranger than most, and my brothers and I were embarrassed to bring friends home with us. We concluded that our mother was high strung. And today, I’m certain that she was unhappy in her marriage and with being a full-time housewife and mother after getting her Ph.D. in physics. I’m not married, I don’t have any children. I’m a woman who has tried to avoid my mother’s fate, and yet in some ways I seem to have embraced it.

I used to live in a cramped one-bedroom apartment, a rental with nearly opaque windows and a perpetual film of grime over the sloppily painted white woodwork. I worked hard to keep the place tidy in spite of its obviously dingy natural state. On the whole, I think I succeeded in keeping order; and in any case, as small as it was, it wasn’t an endless universe to maintain to an acceptable level.

I liked the place and felt comfortable there. I knew the neighbors and could identify each of their footsteps on the hallway tile. I had lived there for ten years and expected to continue living there. Except that I got a notice shoved under my door. Like other old apartments in my apparently up-and-coming neighborhood, my building was going condo. And of course I could not afford to buy the place and stay there. So I was anxious; I had to figure out another place to live, in a neighborhood I could actually afford. I had to pack up my life and prepare for change.

I’m a freelance indexer who specializes in psychology texts, which means that my income is erratic and depends on the volume and variety of books being published. When the economy is bad, as it is now, publishers aren’t lining up to publish professional books. It’s a hazard of my skill set. I do what I can, though, and attend many professional society meetings to network and build contacts. I also have a listing in the Literary Market Place, which brings in the occasional job. I generally do okay.

Another one of the perils of freelance work, in the United States, anyway, is health insurance. I don’t have any, which is an irony for me, working on psychology titles as I do. I’m pretty certain I’m obsessive-compulsive (and maybe a few other things; reading lists of symptoms always makes me feel like I have eight or ten of them). In previous times, they would institutionalize you if you got bad, but these days, there are drugs to calm the chemical firings in your brain. Unfortunately, I can’t afford any of these drugs, so I manage the best that I can.

It took me a while to find a new place, given my limited budget. But about a year ago, shortly after Christmas, I bought a house, a two-bedroom bungalow. It was a miracle that I could afford it, really. But it needed a lot of work and was in a bad part of town. When I moved in, I washed down every surface; swept, vacuumed, and waxed all the floors; and painted three coats over the previous owner’s nicotine-stained whole-house avocado color scheme (I chose a soothing lemon shade). I vacuumed out the windows and crawled along the baseboards wielding a damp rag and a bottle of Murphy’s oil soap, orange scented. I bleached and scrubbed with a wire brush the filthy hexagonal floor tile in the bathroom. In attacking the kitchen, I used up five bottles of Lysol, because after a while I abandoned mixing it with the water and instead poured it directly into the drawers and cupboards. I would not deny that the entire endeavor was a lot of work that took me the bulk of the winter to accomplish.

When spring came, I turned my mind to the outdoors, to my yard.